Left-hander Julio Urias starts for the Dodgers tonight in Game 4 of the NLCS against the Cubs. Here’s something you probably already know about him: he’s really young. Urias turned 20 on August 12 of this year. For the purposes of websites such as this one (which use July 1 as a cutoff), that places Urias in the midst of his age-19 season. When Urias pitched in relief during Game 5 of the NLDS, he became the fourth-youngest pitcher in major-league history (Bert Blyleven, Ken Brett, Don Gullett) to pitch in the postseason, per Baseball-Reference Play Index — and he’s already pitched more innings than Brett and as many as Blyleven. With his first pitch today, he’ll become the youngest pitcher in postseason history to record a start. By comparison, consider that most of the players on both the Cubs and Dodgers had never even appeared in a professional game at the same age Urias ascends to the spotlight.

Only seven players in history have started a playoff game at an age younger than Urias, and they were all position players. They are, in declining order of age at playoff debut: Justin Upton, Claudell Washington, Bryce Harper, Mickey Mantle, Andruw Jones, Phil Cavarretta, and Freddie Lindstrom. 

That’s one way to frame Urias’s accomplishment. Another? By means of this brief timeline concerning the distinction Urias is about to receive:

• On October 9, 1913, Bullet Joe Bush started for the Philadelphia Athletics in the third game of the World Series. he pitched a complete game as the A’s beat the New York Giants 8-2. Bush was 20 years and 316 days old. Bush would hold the record until…
• October 3, 1984, when Bret Saberhagen started for the Kansas City Royals in Game 2 of the ALCS against the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers won 5-3. Saberhagen was 20 years and 175 days old.
• Urias is 20 years and 68 days old today.

Urias’s age is not remarkable solely for how it relates to his postseason appearance and playoff start. His regular-season performance this year, even in limited innings, represents one of the better seasons in history for a player his age. In 77 innings this season, Urias put up a 3.39 ERA and 3.17 FIP, which was good enough to produce a 1.8 WAR. Over the last 40 years, only seven players, position players included, have recorded a better WAR number in a season at 19 years of age or younger: Read the rest of this entry »

I know that we tend to exaggerate the meaning of the playoffs, which means we tend to exaggerate the meaning of playoff player performance. Regular players are made out to be heroes, superstars completing their development on the national stage. The playoffs make it easy to get swept away by anything. The increased focus on every single individual event allows for one to forget that all of these sample sizes are remarkably small. Through the middle of May, the Phillies had one of the best records in baseball. The Phillies were a bad team all along.

The point is: I get it. And, you get it. We all understand the postseason booby traps. And yet I need to share that Javier Baez is taking the playoffs over. Baez, already, was opening national eyes, and he owned the NLDS against the Giants. Sunday against the Dodgers, Baez authored a new chapter for his aggressively-growing legend. Not even very long ago, Baez felt risky and almost disposable. Now it’s difficult to see the Cubs winning without him.

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Clayton Kershaw continued to chip away at the mostly misguided narrative that he’s not a postseason pitcher, throwing seven dominant shutout innings against the Cubs at Wrigley in Sunday night’s 1-0 NLCS Game 2 victory, striking out six while walking just one. Kershaw talked manager Dave Roberts into letting him face the final batter of the seventh inning with reliever Kenley Jansen ready for action in the bullpen. Having thrown just 84 pitches after the conclusion of the seventh, Kershaw certainly would have gone out for the eighth inning if this were regular-season game, and likely would have gotten a shot for a complete-game shutout in the ninth.

As his final pitch count indicates, Kershaw was incredibly efficient with his pitches against Chicago’s typically uber-patient lineup, needing just 45 pitches to get through 4.2 perfect innings before Javier Baez’s two-out single in the fifth broke up his bid for perfection. He either got ahead of or retired each of the first six batters he faced, and seven of the first nine the first time through the order.

The pitches he threw to those nine batters the first time through the order:

Even the two that missed were close. In text form, in case you couldn’t pick up the pitch types from the video, those nine first-pitches were:

1. fastball
2. fastball
3. fastball
4. fastball
5. fastball
6. fastball
7. fastball
8. fastball
9. fastball

This isn’t exactly a new development for Kershaw. We talk a lot about Kershaw’s extremes, and one of the perhaps underrated Kershaw outlier tendencies is his reliance on the first-pitch fastball. To measure this, I took every pitcher who faced at least 500 batters this year, using BaseballSavant, and I calculated their fastball rate on the first pitch of at-bats, and on the rest of the pitches in at-bats, and found the difference between the two, indicating the pitchers who most relied on the fastball to begin at-bats, relative to the rest of their arsenal.

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It’s convenient the way this worked out. In the worst-case interpretation, Javier Baez got away with something on Sunday. In the best-case interpretation, Baez might’ve taken advantage of a rule-book loophole. What Baez did provoked Dave Roberts to complain at least a little bit, but in the end, the Dodgers scored one run, and the Cubs scored less than that. Because the Dodgers won, Baez’s play doesn’t matter. So now we can talk about it a little bit without emotions threatening to take over.

In Game 2, Baez was praised for his casual on-the-fly brilliance, and it came up because of a double play he started in the top of the sixth. The play allowed for the Cubs to get out of a jam, keeping the deficit at the narrowest margin. The Dodgers wouldn’t have any real protest if Baez started a regular double play. But this double play started with Baez very much intentionally not catching a catchable baseball.

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Baseball can be such a complex game. We’ve got radars and cameras that track every movement on the field and spit out massive data sets at the conclusion of each contest. We’ve got run-expectancy simulators and lineup optimizers and a tool that allows one to search any combination of season, game, split, event, and streak stats from any player in any number of years dating back more than a century. We love baseball due in part to its layers of intricacies; there’s something for everyone, and no two fans share an identical relationship with the sport. At its core, baseball, to the observer, serves as nothing more than a distraction, and the complexity of the game affords those observers a seemingly infinite supply of secondary distractions when the primary one is insufficient.

Baseball can be such a simple game. Sometimes, even with all the information at the disposal of the coaches and players, it can be best not to overthink things. Important moment? Bring in the best pitcher. Bring in the best pitcher, the way Dave Roberts did with Kenley Jansen with two men on and no outs in the bottom of the seventh of an NLDS Game 5, facing elimination. Got a good pitch? Throw that pitch. Throw that pitch 39 out of 47 times, the way Jansen did with his cutter to carve up the Nationals for 2.1 erratic but effective innings.

Jansen’s decisions with the cutter were nothing out of the ordinary — he threw his cutter 83% of the time last night, he threw his cutter 88% of the time during the regular season — but there was something about his outing, something about the way that he works in a near-state of perpetual motion, that brought a sort of calming beauty to an otherwise hectic and turbulent affair. A 4-hour, 32-minute game which featured a 66-minute seventh inning, a 13-pitch walk, 11 pitching changes, and, eventually, a moment of triumph. And in the middle of all that was a 29-year-old former catcher from Curaçao, standing on the pitcher’s mound in the middle of a whirlwind in perhaps the biggest moment of his career, just throwing cutter after cutter.

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Let’s pick it up in the bottom of the sixth, shall we? In a decisive Game 5, the Nationals held a 1-0 lead, and they were looking to stretch it. With two outs and someone on first who can run faster than you can, Ryan Zimmerman knocked a double to the left-field corner, and the Nationals’ third-base coach got aggressive. He waved Jayson Werth around, figuring that an insurance run would be absolutely massive. An out and, well, you tried, and you’ve still got the late lead. Werth gave it what he could.

That’s Werth at the bottom, running his tail off. Coach Bob Henley isn’t even looking anymore, now that the matter would be out of his hands. By this point he must’ve had a suspicion. Based on my calculations, the break-even rate here was 35%. That is, it made sense to send Werth around third if you thought he’d be safe at home at least 35% of the time. With the throw coming from just past third base, it looked like Werth would be safe at home about 0% of the time.

The camera has panned, and you don’t see the baseball. That’s because the baseball is in the glove of the catcher, and Werth is maybe, what, two-thirds of the way to the plate? Less than that? Werth is out. He’s so out. Baserunners are practically never this out. Werth is so out he might’ve given brief consideration to turning around. Until just a few years ago, a play that developed like this might’ve at least resulted in an exciting collision. Collisions are easy sells to the members of an average audience. Runners used to have one way out. That way was dangerous, and sometimes electrifying.

Werth stopped. He didn’t stay stopped — he went to the trouble of closing the distance. But Werth gave up. He was out, and he knew it, and he accepted it, and the Nationals still had the lead. So concluded a thrilling baseball sequence, by which a casual baseball viewer might not have been thrilled.

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Over time, teams take on the characteristics of some of their key players in the minds of analysts and fans. The Rays are eternally linked with Evan Longoria, known for power taking precedence at the plate, with a focus on defense. Similarly, Ryan Braun is the poster child for the Brewers, a bat-oriented player without a material defensive presence.

This week and next, let’s allow the players themselves to fade into the background, and draw some conclusions from a simple set of numbers — namely, each of the 10 playoff clubs’ team ball-in-play (BIP) statistics, broken down by exit speed and launch angles. We’ll examine what made these teams tick during the regular season and allowed them to play meaningful October baseball.

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In a few hours, the Dodgers and Nationals are going to play for their seasons; one team will advance, one will go home. The Nationals are in a pretty good position, hosting the game in Washington while throwing their ace, Max Scherzer; it’s hard to ask for much more than that if you’re in an elimination game. The Dodgers used their ace in Game 4, however, so they’re going to be mixing and matching in order to try win this one.

While they haven’t officially announced anything, the team is expected to start Rich Hill. Given his health track record, however, and the fact that he’s going on three days rest, they’re probably not going to have him work too deep into the game. In fact, reading the tea leaves from Andy McCullough’s game preview, it sounds like the Dodgers are going into this game planning for something of a tandem start.

“We talked about Rich as an option, obviously,” Manager Dave Roberts said after the Dodgers’ 6-5 win on Tuesday. “But so is Julio, and how we want to strategize to win Game 5, we’re going to talk through it.”

…

The combination of Hill and Julio Urias is unorthodox, but it would reduce the chances of Washington’s top four hitters — Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, Jayson Werth and Daniel Murphy — from getting comfortable at the plate against either. Hitters tend to perform better when they have seen a pitcher more than once in a game. The Dodgers will try not to allow that to happen on Thursday.

If the Dodgers are serious about limiting Hill and Urias to one trip through the order, that would be something indeed; they’d be limiting themselves to getting likely six or seven outs from each pitcher, and would be relying on the rest of their bullpen to get the other ~13 outs, despite being worked pretty heavily in both games in Los Angeles. It would be the most aggressive kind of bullpen game we’ve been expecting so far in the playoffs, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, I’m not sure how well set up they are to actually pull it off.

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Clayton Kershaw looked on from the dugout while the inning he started lived on. It was the seventh inning of Tuesday night’s Game 4 of the NLDS between the Dodgers and the Nationals in Los Angeles, and Kershaw was responsible for all three of the men on base in a three-run game. Pedro Baez took the mound in an attempt to preserve the lead. Baez threw one pitch, it hit Jayson Werth’s elbow, a run scored, and out went Baez. Kershaw might not have flashbacks, but he’s seen this situation before. The camera panned to the dugout.

In came Luis Avilan. He threw two pitches, the latter of which hit Daniel Murphy’s bat, landed in the outfield grass, and two runs scored. Game tied. The camera panned to the dugout.

The Dodgers went on to win the game, 6-5, forcing a Game 5, so in hindsight, what happened in this inning doesn’t much matter. But Kershaw’s pitching line won’t change: 6.2 IP, 7 H, 5 ER, 2 BB, 11 K, 0 HR. I’m not alone in saying Kershaw pitched much better than that line might indicate. In fact, all things considered — pitching on three days rest, throwing a 27-pitch first inning, being asked to throw 110 pitches and face Bryce Harper three times, despite those two preceding points — I’m guessing I wouldn’t be alone in saying Kershaw pitched brilliantly. And yet, he’s been charged with five earned runs. His ERA for the day was 6.75.

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The Dodgers, of course, announced that they’re going with Kershaw today. But I’d still have gone the other way.

It’s becoming an October tradition; as the Dodgers head into game four of the NLDS, they are considering whether to bring back Clayton Kershaw on three days rest. As I sat down to talk about their decision on who to pitch today, I realized this is the third time in four years we’ve written this same post.

Back in 2013, Jeff Sullivan wrote about the decision between starting Kershaw or Ricky Nolasco. In 2014, Jeff again wrote about the call to pick Kershaw over Dan Haren. Last year, apparently we got distracted by Chase Utley’s slide or something, because we didn’t appear to write about the Dodgers using Kershaw in game four of the series against the Mets, but that happened too; the Dodgers have thrown Kershaw in games one and four of the division series three straight years, bringing him back on three days rest each time.

This year, though, I think they should do it differently. I think they should start Julio Urias today.

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